Before about the 1930's, nearly all farmers raised a few chickens, primarily for their own use for meat and eggs. Some farmers having a surplus of chickens, would sell them and their eggs locally. Some farmers, realizing that there was a market for chickens in the larger cities, began to sell live chickens at the farmer's markets. Those purchasing chickens would take them home and kill them, scald the carcasses to remove the feathers and eviscerate the carcasses. If the home owner did not want to handle the chickens, he or she could have the local butcher do the killing and processing. As demand for live chickens grew, some farmers began to specialize and begin trucking the live chickens such as Barred Plymouth Rocks into the cities in quantities. The poultry industry really started around 1932 and a large poultry house could handle about five hundred (500) chickens, but most farmers grew about two hundred and fifty (250) at a time. In the early days, it took about sixteen or seventeen weeks to get to a three pound average chicken. Today in seven weeks, we have achieved a four and a half pound (41/2) chicken on average.
By the late 1930's, chicken was selling for fifty to sixty cents a pound live weight. This price is about the same today. At best, in the early years of chicken raising, a farmer could get only about three or four crops of chickens a year. Today, he averages about 6 to 7 crops. After World War II, the poultry industry took off and in the late 1950's, farmers built chicken houses for flocks of six or seven thousand. Most of the farmers who raised only smaller amounts eventually went out of the business. Today, most of the producers have between seven hundred fifty thousand to a million chickens per week year round.
Modern incubators can handle about eleven thousand eggs each an average size hatching can and produce about fifty-five thousand chicks a day allowing for losses. The supervised farms produce the eggs, which are bought back by the breeder who produces the chicks, which are sold back to the farmer along with required feed. When the chickens are five to seven weeks old, they go to a processing plant where they are cleaned, chilled or frozen, and shipped all over the United States to maintain the national tradition of chicken every Sunday.
In all of this development, it became necessary to develop eviscerating and processing equipment to handle the large numbers of broilers. The automatic equipment would de-feather and eviscerate the chickens and prepare the carcasses for packaging, freezing or refrigerating, depending upon the market demands as to whether the meat was to be fresh or frozen.
By 1960, eviscerated carcasses were being shipped by refrigerated trucks to markets (supermarket stores) and commercial market (restaurants) in large cities. They were displayed under glass in refrigerated cases in stores. Discriminating purchasers and housewives were able to detect any immature feathers, called "pin feathers" on the carcasses due to incomplete picking by mechanical pickers. If these "pin feathers" were red or black, then they were readily seen and portrayed as a dirty carcass. If the remaining "pin feathers" were white, they blended in with the natural skin color of the carcass and were not easily seen and for the most part, went undetected by the purchasers.
The processors quickly realized and acted on the advantages of a broiler with all white plumage, and in some instances abruptly ceased to accept red-feathered chickens for processing. Today, all commercial broilers are white plumaged; therefore, the orthodox method of auto-sexing chickens by mating red males to silver females to produce white males and red females broilers became unacceptable, because the red females would not be purchased by the processor and would have to be discarded as a total loss.
In essence, something had to be done to eliminate the loss problem. The resulting invention is designed to overcome the difficulties because it produces males with white plumage and bleaches out the red feathers of the females to become all white or at least with light red overcoating with white or creamy white undercoating of feathers with no detectable dark "pin feathers" portraying what appears to be a dirty carcass. In some instances, the males may have red feathering detectable as for instance on the back, neck or head, but dark "pin feathers" are notably absent.
Early sexing of the chicks was important, since the females could be housed separately without the need for feeding the chicks until they became of such size that the males could be easily distinguished from the females.
Broiler producers around the world have been searching for an efficient, economical method of determining the sex of day old chicks. Vent sexing and feather sexing have been used by the various broiler producers, but these methods have been found to have substantial economic disadvantages because of the substantial time required and labor costs in separating the male from the female chicks. The use of probes (Halverson et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,508,165) is also an expensive procedure and not practical economically. Light sensing of anal areas of chicks (Suzuki U.S. Pat. No. 4,417,663) is another way of determining sex of chicks, but it is also expensive and time consuming as each chicks must be handled and manipulated. The use of experts who could feather sex the chicks has been used, but such experts are costly and feathering is time consuming.
This invention involves a unique observation. It was noticed that about 20% of broilers from a line designated as gold of commercial meat-type chickens, were white and 80% were reddish as expected. The 20% white broilers, "white sports," were separated out and grown under careful observation. They sprouted red feathers up to about 3 weeks of age, but as they grew older, the red color faded away due to fade out genes, and at broiler age of up to 7 weeks, they were practically white or at the least had a white undercoat of feathers.
Out of this observation, it was perceived that a process of producing broiler chickens through careful manipulation of the genetic composition of the male and female parent lines would increase the overall performance and efficiency of broiler production, thereby increasing profits to the poultry industry. The invention involves a continued production of broilers by mating a white feathered male parent line to a white feathered female line, resulting in broilers of both sexes with white feathers. As an additional option, the white female parent should be infused with the dominant so-called silver (S) gene, which is sex-linked, and if mated to a "fade-out" so called gold or red male, would at hatching produce white male day-old chicks and buff or reddish female chicks, thereby allowing separation of the sexes according to the down color. The above noted objections are overcome by infusing the genes of the "white sports" from the red male parent line into a fast growing, heavy-breasted current white parent male line and mating this new synthetic gold male line to the new white silver female line. This produces white feathered male broiler chicks at hatching, and distinctive buff or reddish female chicks at hatching, thus allowing auto-sexing by down color. These buff female chicks grow up to be acceptable broilers for processing and sale as clean carcasses to all final consumers because they inherit the "fade out" gene carried by the male parent and actually have white feathers or at least a white undercoat of feathers at broiler age and on processing will have no unsightly red "pin feathers."